Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

What Song Will You Sing?

A Meditation for the 7th Sunday of Easter (click here for biblical texts)

The cynic’s saying No good deed goes unpunished may have occurred to Paul in Philippi when— after making common cause with Lydia and friends—he ordered ugly spirits to leave a servant girl who irritated him with public pronouncements . We don’t know her feelings about being released from demon’s power but Paul and Silas find themselves on the wrong end of the law because her owners are enriched from her fortune-telling. Not for the first time or the last, emissaries of The Way find themselves stripped, beaten, and locked up.

bloorlansdownechristianfellowship.wordpress.com

But the story takes an unexpected turn to become one of the greatest liberation moments of all time, perhaps ultimate in nonviolent revolution, a model for how God works when we pray and get out of the way. Singing and praying in the night, as their fellow prisoners listen, some force—is it an act of nature or of God or simply the earnest, faithful power of their prayers and voices— creates a midnight disturbance, an earthquake we are told, that flings open every cell door without so much as leaving a trace of damage to the walls and foundation. Even more, no one injured, not even the jailer who had confined Paul and Silas to the worst of the puny accommodations. In gratitude he takes his new friends home for blessing and supper.

This is the way we want our world to work! Hebrews escape between the walls of the Red Sea but Egyptians are so overcome by the sight they do not pursue and thus do not die. Israelites advance into Canaan and locals are so glad to see them they throw a neighborhood party. In his determination to find the child born in Bethlehem Herod throws a giant party, treating all the children and their parents to dinner, games and magic show before sending them home. In our own version of Canaan (recreated in Palestine in 1948?), European settlers bring much wealth to share with natives, no attacks are made by either side, no reservations for native peoples are created and none die from diseases imported from Europe. And here’s one more: needing to import labor, recruiters go to Africa with brochures and bonuses for early signing, inviting locals onto cruise ships for the voyage across the Atlantic with secure, paying jobs and health care waiting here for those who choose the journey to try a New World.

And how about this? Police, leaders, citizens learn to sit down with young Black men, listen to what they need to gain self-respect, and then work to meet the need.

A utopia, you say?

But why not? Paul and Silas were two men, people like us. God is still God. Let’s start praying and singing (don’t worry about your voice, it is the intention that matters), and expecting the disturbance. The world is ready for change. It begins when we unlock whatever cell of despair, discouragement, and doubt where we have put ourselves or have allowed others with a different agenda to confine us.

About this poem . . .Acts of the Apostles continues to share stories of divine intervention (at least that is how I see an earthquake that does no damage) that challenge our rational minds. But is that not the job of faith, to move us beyond our ordinary selves into the realm of Spirit where anything may happen, especially if it intends or results in liberation for the oppressed?